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The cosmic terror of black holes

Also, food videos but I end the video when it stops being kosher

Rohan Salmond

Aug 25, 2022 • 5 min read

It’s been a big week for me this week! Not much to say about it yet, but I’ve had to work odd hours and I’m very tired. I’ve also had a few thoughts about black holes, which I have shared below. A reminder that I’m not doing theology (or science!) in this newsletter I’m just thinking about time scales completely beyond my comprehension.

Here’s this week’s religion roundup:

Is the world ready for three popes?? Sam Harris: Telescopes prove heaven doesn’t exist. Parents try to ban books from school library, accidentally ban the Bible. Hillsong is restructuring! It will be legal to have gay sex in Singapore — predictably some people are mad. “Israeli parents start affair while on school Holocaust trip to Poland”, reports the Jerusalem Post. A civil suit against Cardinal George Pell is proceeding. John Piper’s website says real men have beards but John Piper can’t or won’t grow a beard.

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This edition is too long to read in email, so if you want to see the cool AI art at the end of this edition, click on the title above to read it on the web.

I listened to NASA’s data sonification of a black hole and all I got was this cosmic terror

Seems a bit full-on to me that these deadly, unfathomable, almost unobservable entities exist out in the cold darkness of space and this is what they sound like?

Except it’s somehow weirder. The ABC reports that the sound we are hearing in the video “is actually 144 quadrillion and 288 quadrillion times higher than the signals' original frequencies”, which means it's making a noise so low and so deep we can’t even conceive it.

There’s a lot about black holes we can’t properly conceive, including how long they will exist. If our theories are correct, at some point they will be the only objects left in the universe. They will endure well beyond the existence of all light and life that has ever existed, and could ever exist.

As far as we are concerned, they are eternal (but not literally, apparently). This Kurzgesagt video explains this concept, as well as more esoteric ideas about what happens to the stuff black holes consume. I’m sure it’s a contested theory, but given what we think we know about quantum physics, black holes could contain truly incomprehensible amounts of “information” (which I gather has a particular meaning in physics).

This reminds me of the Great Old Ones from Dungeons and Dragons — Lovecraftian terrors that can give warlocks their magic.

Here’s how one is described in the 5th Edition Player’s Handbook:

...a mysterious entity whose nature is utterly foreign to the fabric of reality. … Its motives are incomprehensible to mortals, and its knowledge so immense and ancient that even the greatest libraries pale in comparison to the vast secrets it holds. The Great Old One might be unaware of your existence or entirely indifferent to you, but the secrets you have learned allow you to draw your magic from it.

I play D&D, so I’ve naturally jumped on the ‘cosmic horror between the stars’ angle. Listening to that sound, I thought about how the sun was an object of worship in the past and still is today for some.

Black holes that exist now will outlast the sun. They are indifferent to the universe and bend time and space around them. It would be fun to play in a “modern D&D” campaign as a warlock whose patron is a black hole — they’re the closest things to gods we can actually observe, after all.

While we’re doing creepy, try “The Last Supper by Hieronymus Bosch”

Drawn by Mid Journey, an AI. Click through to see more variations! (Thanks Jimbo)

A good tweet to cleanse your palate

The same could be said for banshees.

Reacting to food videos but I end the video when it stops being kosher

I’ve been really enjoying the @jewishmemesonly Instagram account even though I don’t always have the background knowledge to get all the jokes. The account is run by Shoshana Gottlieb (who is Australian!) and it’s in a kind-of similar vein to the @ineedgodineverymomentofmylife account I wrote about around this time last year.

@taxiapologist #duet with @morgan another short one (:

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The most accessible part of the account is definitely “Reacting to food videos but I end the video when it stops being kosher”, which is also on Shoshana’s TikTok (above).

Shoshana is also the co-host of the Pop Culture Parasha podcast!

“when church end ?”

Some nice things to read

I recently rewatched a bunch of Game of Thrones, and the thing that surprised me was that in the latter seasons, anytime the dragons (mostly Drogon) are really around and doing their thing (aka burning everything around them), their presence completely overwhelm everything else. They’re just operating on a scale of threat (and maybe size) that nothing else can approach. It’s like having King Kong as one of the six characters on Friends.